The Semi-Living' and 'Partial Life'

him to engage with the occult. In short, the ontological
questions thrown up by Carrel’s scientific experiments
ironically seem to have led to his mystic and eugenic
tendencies.
However, rather than looking at tissue culture or
partial life as a metaphor for the pure and perfected
life, we would like to explore partial life (or semi-life) as
a hybrid, dependent and imperfect entity. In the 'The
Tissue Culture King', written in 1926, Julian Huxley
reflects and articulates some of the anxieties
surrounding early experiments in this field. ‘The Tissue
Culture King’ is a story about a Western scientist,
Hascombe, who is captured by an African tribe. In order
to save his life, he employs his skills in the service of an
African king. He decides to merge scientific principles
and techniques with the religious tendencies of the
tribe. Hascombe then employs tissue culture techniques
to create ‘The Factory of Kingship or Majesty, and the
Wellspring of Ancestral Immortality’. The idea is to
culture parts of the king’s (or other ancestors’) bodies
and, through that, increase the biomass of the king,
thus enabling the people of the community to own parts
of the king, and to physically nurture, care and worship
them. Furthermore, this technique promises to
‘increase the safety, if not of the king as an individual,
at least the life which was in him, and I presumed that
this would be equally satisfactory from a theological
point of view.’ Hence, the fragment stands for the whole
in this story. Huxley considers the wide implications of
the discipline of tissue culture and the associated
epistemological revelations by looking at the option of
mass production. He also considers the economic and
spiritual potential of the use and abuse of scientific
knowledge and of applied technologies and social